For my project, I'm going to do the creative path and make an altered book: painting/decorating/cutting words out of the pages of an existing novel to create an entirely new story out of the existing one.

I plan on taking the an old paperback and emphasizing certain passages and words to change the narrative, while leaving some of the original pages visible, though obscured. Depending how the story turns out, I might also try some other strategies used by altered book artists, such as cutting out niches in the pages in which to put items relevant to the story. I think it'll be interesting to have parts of two narratives present at once, within the same set of words: The one intended by the author, and the one created by decorating the pages.

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 When approaching my Choose Your Own Adventure book, By Balloon to the Sahara, I imagined the story world as a series of roads leading to a finite number of destinations: Each decision at a fork eliminates some of the possible endings, moving the story forward in time until the reader reaches a single ending. Theoretically, if this were the case, the first decision - "If you land the balloon, turn to page 2. If you ride out the storm, turn to page 3." - would divide the number of possible endings in half, and the stories branching out from page 2 would intersect rarely, if at all, with the stories from page 3. In fact, in my image, the options branching out from page 2 and from page 3 are represented in different colors (which was, of course, carefully planned, and not just a convenient default of the software I used). 

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Tuesday night, instead of watching the World Series game, I experienced real-time media another way: I followed election results on Twitter, via the #Maine hashtag, which tracked the results of Maine's Proposition 1, which if passed would ban gay marriage.

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One of my favorite types of fiction in the whole wide world is steampunk, which has been described as "Victorian science fiction" - but beyond that, the definition has been the subject of some debate lately. There are two basic camps: First, the Neo-Victorians, who emphasize the "steam" part and consider steampunk to be primarily a form of alternate history, with all the trappings of the historical Victorian era, with some crazy steam-powered technology and mad scientists thrown in; and second, the people who emphasize the "punk," and associate steampunk less with historical accuracy and more with a particular aesthetic and ideology.

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Recently a friend got me involved in an alternate reality game (ARG) called The Sect Is Here. I've never played such a game before, so I'm a bit fuzzy on how it works, but Wikipedia has some explanation.

Basically, it reminds me of an RPG, only instead of playing on a game console you and interacting with scripted non-player characters, you're playing in the "real world" (in the form of websites, forums, even mystery addresses to real-life places) and interacting with characters - who may actually be other players, it's hard to tell - in real time.

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A while ago in class we talked about what comics are worth analyzing - Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Marvel Zombies (?) - and out of curiosity I typed Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series into a literary criticism database. A few reviews came up, and some overviews of the series, along with a small handful of analytical essays, all focused on two particular issues: The ones that featured Shakespeare.

This made me giggle at how something has to have Shakepeare to be literature, and then I kind of forgot about it.

But the other day I was at the bookstore and I noticed their comic section had a shelf divided into "Literature" and "General." In Literature, most of Alan Moore's comics were shelved alongside comic versions of famous books: Shakespeare, Dickens, HP Lovecraft, the Iliad, Picture of Dorian Grey, the Constitution. (Seriously, a comic Constitution.) Scott McCloud's Making Comics was also Literature. So were Alien Hunters and GI Joe.

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So I'm into Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction, and I'm currently reading a marvelous book called The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters, by the marvelously verbose Gordon Dahlquist. It's taking me a while to get through, partly because it's almost 800 pages, but partly because the breaks are really, really weird.

I'm used to typical novels - a scene happens, the scene ends, and then there's an extra line break before the next paragraph. This is your cue, as a reader, that you've reached a good stopping point: The bit you were reading is all wrapped up, and you're free to fold the page down and continue at another time. Even in books that don't have chapters, that extra little space is usually enough to let you know where the comfortable breaks between things are.

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Has anyone here ever read a liveblog?

It's a mess. Commentary from people who actually know what they're talking about mixed in with tweets from Twitter that use the relevant hashtag comments from viewers, updating every minute or so in a constant stream of information. It's interrupted by occasional polls, that flash across the bottom of the page, and if you don't have the actual streaming video they're blogging about open in another window and any relevant information on hand elsewhere you won't have a clue what's going on.

I'm currently in the middle of the liveblog for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and it's interesting how a "narrative" of sorts is constructed from all the various elements. There's definitely a flow similar to what we discussed for television - the dominant part, commentary on the actual hearing, is periodically interrupted by tweets with links to other relevant websites (commercials?) and poll questions, which invite readers to participate in creating the story.

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What do Gossip Girl and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse have in common?

When we read Bernard Dick's Anatomy of Film Introduction, the section that stood out to me the most was the one on Time-Space relationships: In film, you can do weird things like show two things happening at once, or compress a lot of time visually into a very short amount of time, or slow it down.

So film time (and, by extension, TV time) is flexible. It can also do this weird thing where it folds back onto itself, making the narrative non-chronological to allow you to see several different perspectives of the same space of time.

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Reading Mieke Bal's "Introduction" to Narratology, I kind of laughed when I came across this line:

And how writers proceed we cannot know. Nor do we need or even want to. (pg. 9)

The image of a stereotypical crazy author came to mind; for example, we probably don't want to know how Lewis Carroll went about writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, because it probably involved drugs. And I understand why analyzing how a writer might have gone about writing a narrative is pretty useless, practically speaking. But as a writer, I think it's interesting how fabula, story and text sort themselves out while the narrative is being written, rather than how they appear in retrospect.

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